Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore Part 1 - Stuck in the Sand

This trip was our first shot at back-country camping. It was a minor success, to put it graciousy. The plan was to leave Detroit early Friday afternoon and make the 6-hour drive with enough time to fix dinner and set-up camp for the evening. Here's the map for our trip up:


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Even though we packed everything the night before, we weren't able to leave Detroit until about 3:30 PM on Friday. Already we were three and a half hours behind schedule. We met all kinds of traffic on I-75 on the way up, and we didn't make it to the Upper Peninsula until after midnight.

We had set up a laptop with a USB GPS receiver and loaded on Microsoft Streets and Trips 2007. It directed us well until about 6 miles from our final destination --the drive-in campground at Little Beaver Lake. We were on M-28, a nice, paved highway when it told us to take a right onto the Creighton Truck Trail. This was a rough and very narrow dirt road with plenty of quick turns. We were a little dubious at first, but we trusted the text-to-speech voice of Streets and Trips, which we named "Wanda." This was our first mistake... Here are the directions from maps.google.com and Streets and Trips side-by-side:


Note how Google Maps keeps us on main roads and takes us through three towns, as opposed to Streets and Trips' route.

We continued on, even though at spots the tree branches were hanging down low enough over the road to touch the top of our tiny Dodge Neon. There were multiple forks in the road, but Wanda guided us well. Then came a very narrow fork. We weren't sure which way to go, so we took what appeared to be the more traveled path. We later found out that this was not a road, per se, but "the grade."

The grade is a route wide enough for one vehichle. It is made up of sand that is over a foot deep, and to the best of my knowedge, it's unmarked in all but special maps. Well, as we turned onto the grade, Wanda started complaining about us being "off route." We weren't sure what she was trying to tell us, because as we looked at her map, our pointer was right on top of the route, or so we thought... When we zoomed in, we found that we were actually east of where we were supposed to be, so we stopped and tried to back up. This was the fatal error. The wheels dug into the 18-inch deep sand, and our little neon was stuck.

We got out and tried to dig her out, but to no avail. We actually did get her moving once by jacking the car out of the sand and placing logs under the front tires, but we just got stuck again after another 100 yards. We were stuck in the woods, on what we believed to be a seldomly-traveled trail in the cold, and well out of cell-phone reception areas. We debated whether we should try to hike west to Melstrand right away or wait until morning. By now it was past 3:30 AM, and we were both exhausted from digging, so we decided to rest. Before falling off to sleep, though, we said a brief prayer for help...